Obama's 1st State of the Union

The 2010 State of the Union Address was given by United
States President Barack Obama on January 27, 2010, to a
joint session of Congress. It was aired on all the major
networks starting at 9 PM ET. It was Obama's first State
of the Union Address.

The speech was delivered on the floor of the United States
House of Representatives in the United States Capitol.
Among the topics that Obama covered in his speech were
proposals for job creation and federal deficit reduction.

This is another in a series of major public speechs by
Obama, beginning during the campaign. They have generally
correlated with substantial deviations, and while this
speech was given after a year of less than great news, it
does show a small positive deviation (twice as large as the
GCP composite average effect size.)

The GCP event was set for 9:00 pm ET to 11:00, and the
speech started at about 9:15 (marked in the figure below).
The outcome is
7296.7 on 7200 df, for p = 0.210 and Z = 0.808.

It is important to keep in mind that we have only a tiny
statistical
effect, so that it is always hard to distinguish signal from
noise. This means that every "success" might be largely
driven by chance, and every "null" might include a real
signal overwhelmed by noise. In the long run, a real effect
can
be identified only by patiently accumulating replications of
similar analyses.